PENCIL TO CAMERA
I imagine sitting on the banks of the Ticino River outside Milan watching Leonardo da Vinci drawing the movements of whirling eddies. His pencil marks tracing and translating the spectacle before him, trying to record the details of his observations. Sitting still his mind full of questions rages like the river and droplets pool into pockets of time spent watching and observing. He wonders about the form in relation to its motion, the patterns, and the light on the surface of the water. The pencil moves as quickly as the hand will allow it while the eyes try to survey the moving waters.
He draws and he writes:
“So moving water strives to maintain the course pursuant to the power which occasions it and, if it finds an obstacle in its path, completes the span of the course it has commenced by a circular and revolving movement.”
Despite his concentration the lines remain blurred and the movements never stop. Even a single drop of water quickly merges with the river, it’s edges no longer expressed as it turns and bends always in transformation moving from one place to the next. As Leonardo da Vinci fills the in-betweens of the movements through movements of his own, tracing the form through repeated circular gestures—I wonder if he wishes the water to be still? I wonder if Leonardo da Vinci often thinks about the camera obscura as he watches water whirling in an eddy?
I can only imagine the frustration he must have felt in his pursuit to understand the subject of his inquiry and despite the immense concentration and focus not being able to “see” the phenomenon in plain sight. Observing the long curly strands of hair might have been da Vinci’s way of making the spiraling eddies stand still. To him, perhaps, the interweaving strands and knots were like streams merging into rivers of turbulent waters.
Observation seemed to play a fundamental role in his quest to understand the world around him as so much as he dedicated research to the study of optics and explored the subject in a variety of systems; he constructed and imagined devices with apertures and lenses that would extend the limits of sight, he studied human anatomy using cadavers, drew geometrical diagrams for calculating motion, distances, and light—he drew what he saw, and he wrote extensively.
“O marvellous, O stupendous necessity, thou with supreme reason compellest all effects to be the direct result of their causes; and by a supreme and irrevocable law every natural action obeys thee by the shortest possible process. Who would believe that so small a space could contain the images of all the universe? O mighty process! What talent can avail to penetrate a nature such as these? What tongue will it be that can unfold so great a wonder? Verily none! This it is that guides the human discourse to the considering of divine things. Here the forms, here the colours, here all the images of every part of the universe are contracted to a point. What point is so marvellous? O wonderful, O stupendous necessity—by thy law thou constrainest every effect to be the direct result of its cause by the shortest path. These are miracles…forms already lost, mingled together in so small a space it can recreate and recompense by expansion. Describe in thy anatomy what proportion there is between diameters of all the lenses in the eye and the distance from these to the crystalline lens.”
Wonder how Leonardo da Vinci might have used the cameras of the 21st century—mechanisms and devices that have long surpassed pinholes in boxes, mirrors, and lenses. Perhaps it would be to document the subjects of his inquiry; to see in detail the things that could not have been seen before, to capture motion as stillness to slow it down and speed it up, and to see a form in midst metamorphosis. I imagine da Vinci swimming in the blood vessels of the optic nerves through the use of nanotechnologies, lost in the wiring of imaging and printing machines, and submerged in water while flying on top of drones or somewhere in outer space. Would he have worked for Google documenting very inch of space, perhaps for NASA or the Hadron Collider. If da Vinci had a canon DSLR would he still use a pencil to draw?
By Mariam Eqbal